After I put together the puppet on my own, the next step in the stop-motion process was to bring it to life through slapstick comedy. I teamed up with another animator to make our puppets interact with each other funnily and exaggeratedly. To make sure our comedy was on point, I did some research on actors like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd who are masters of slapstick.
I studied these actors closely to figure out what makes slapstick comedy work. Some key elements I found were:
- Physical exaggeration like performing over-the-top movements
- Funny chaos, such as making quick and silly chases
- Crazy situations to heighten the action like ending up in strange and funny problems
- Playful trouble, meaning the character gets into funny accidents but always ends up okay.
- Jokes that grow, also known as having a funny idea that gets repeated like getting your head banging against the same thing multiple times.
- The focus on timing, slapstick is always relying on timing, so planning out your idea will allow the maximum comedic effect.
After studying various videos, I wanted to apply those aspects of physical comedy to my own animation project. I collaborated with my partner to brainstorm ideas and create storyboards.
We decided on a scene where one character pushes another, as we believed it aligned well with the key elements of successful slapstick comedy.
Overall I think this stopmotion experiment had good elements, such as playing with timing and adding that playful trouble with the sudden push of the puppet. Also what I think that I did successfully was adding life to the puppet even when it was standing in place by moving the clothes and hair around. However, I identified areas for improvement, particularly in terms of physical exaggeration and timing. When also thinking about the principles of animation the timing of the anticipation could have time a lot better when the puppet looks towards the audience and winds up to push the other puppet, this would have improved the slapstick comedy a lot more.
After completing that stop-motion I wanted to have another go at some form of slapstick comedy again, but this time I decided to focus on animating just one puppet to really nail the physical comedy and action.
I started sketching out different ideas for storyboards, looking for ones that really stood out to me. I again came up with multiple ideas as I wanted to push the boundaries of my creativity and make the ideas as ridiculous as possible.
Next, I sat down with my tutor to go over the storyboards to get some feedback. We decided to go with the idea of a ball hitting the character, as the other ideas seemed a bit too complicated and didn’t have that quick, to-the-point physical comedy. My tutor also suggested I shorten my idea to make sure I didn’t drag out the stop-motion process. After making a few cuts, I began working on the animation.
With the finished product, I can say that I am a lot more satisfied with this second experiment given the time I had. I was able to add more physical exaggeration to the performance as well as play with the timing of the ball and the anticipation of the character getting hit and reacting to seeing the ball. If I were able to do another experiment with the puppet again, I would try and have the character move around the stage more and allow the character to have more body acting. In retrospect the animation that I did it felt that I wasn’t able to move the character around more and there was more focus on the ball, which I did want, so the next time I will need to plan even more carefully to see if there are things that I can change to make the slapstick comedy more interesting.